Thursday, April 26, 2007

There are many of us who wonder why gadgets would not run on XP. Because there are many of us who do not want to upgrade to Vista, for lack of sufficient reason to do so. Why buy a more expensive OS when the current one suits us fine? There are others, desktop gadgets - mentioned in my earlier posts - which do not require Vista, and can run on Windows 2000+ machines.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The race towards offering the best connected desktop is hotting up. Already there were quite a few players that had created desktop-resident technologies with Yahoo and Google being the heavy weights from the web space, and of course, Microsoft with its Vista Gadget offering - after all, Microsoft does own the desktop. But there are more players getting added in every month, and that too, more of the enterprise types than the consumer types.

Hyperion is a case in point. With its recent announcement of Smart Space Gadgets , Hyperion delivers, I quote - "always-on business intelligence (BI) and BPM to knowledge workers throughout the enterprise" from its BI application. Smart space gadgets run only on Vista, so I guess it can get rolled out only after the next desktop upgrade cycle. I saw BEA making a similar annoucement some time back.

But desktop connectivity can also be made available on desktops without Vista upgrades. Yahoo Widgets, for example, runs on all Windows 2000+ machines, and so does Google Desktop.

Then why this preference to Vista gadgets? Specially since Vista hasnt exactly seen a upgrade wave as yet. Incidentally, clever strategy by Microsoft - using their hegemony at the desktop to enter some other area. In this case, it appears that Microsoft wants to enter the enterprise back-end. They have done this earlier - piggy backing on some existing products to enter other areas, and with devastating effect. This time around, other vendors seem to be helping Microsoft to succeed in this upgrade-to-Vista-to-get-personalised-gadgets strategy. Interesting.